1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of computer networks and, more particularly, to on-demand application delivery.
2. Description of the Related Art
As computer performance increases for desktops and servers and computer memory storage and data bandwidth increase, so does the amount and complexity of data that business and industry daily manage. A large portion of the data involves corporate information managed for a company or workgroup by one or more servers. The hardware and software components of these servers provide employees and customers the ability to search, access and update the corporate information such as electronic documents, email messages, announcements, tasks, discussion topics, and so forth. For an information technology (IT) administrator to centralize management of the corporate information and the computing support for employees and customers, an IT administrator may utilize a datacenter. A datacenter is a centralized repository, either physical or virtual, for the storage, management, and dissemination of this corporate information. A datacenter may also be referred to as a server room or a server farm.
A datacenter may also act as a restricted access area containing automated systems that constantly monitor server activity, Web traffic, and network performance. In addition to all of these demands of running and supporting a datacenter, an IT administrator regularly updates computing environments for employees and customers for continued utilization of the corporate information. Employees and customers may be referred to as end-users. End-users perform tasks on the corporate information from desktops and servers in an office, from personal computers at home, and from laptops in remote locations.
Administering and supporting an IT infrastructure as described above on a large number of end-user systems presents significant challenges. An increasing number of mobile and remote end-users make traditional application delivery less reliable. An increasing mobility of end-users between computers complicates application delivery and license management. Techniques to enhance datacenter agility include multiprocessing and virtualization. However, with so many distributed systems, it may be slow and/or difficult to roll out new applications, update existing ones and remove obsolete ones.
In view of the above, improved systems and methods for on-demand application delivery are desired.